An Impressive Monument to Christopher Isherwood, Man of Letters (and Lovers)
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD INSIDE OUT, by Katherine Bucknell Many writers’ graves are tourist attractions. Not Christopher Isherwood’s.
Indeed, he doesn’t have one. Best remembered for his “Berlin Stories,” which became “I Am a Camera” which became “Cabaret” — and latterly for “A Single Man,” which the designer Tom Ford made into a movie — Isherwood, who died in 1986 at 81, signed away his corpse to science.
Now the director of his foundation, Katherine Bucknell, a novelist herself, has with great care erected a massive literary cenotaph entitled, with an apt echo of this summer’s most successful movie, “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.” It joins Peter Parker’s equally gargantuan “Isherwood: A Life Revealed,” from 20 years ago: twin lions guarding fiercely the library of Isherwood’s own prodigious autofiction, letters and journals.
The biographers’ little-lion friend, their main Christopher whisperer, is Don Bachardy: the artist and Isherwood’s longtime partner, 30 years his junior and fondly known as Kitty.
